Will Brooks, Krugman Join Again to Bash Freeze?

Liberals have sweepingly slammed President Obama's proposed three-year freeze on many domestic programs. The White House had to foresee this reaction: in March
2009, Congressional Republicans proposed their own spending freeze, to similarly harsh reaction. The two plans are distinct, of course. But the motivation--to appease fiscal conservatives with spending
cuts--and the ensuing
backlash are similar.

In March, that backlash included two of
American politics' most influential pundits: Nobel-winning liberal New
York Times columnist Paul Krugman and popular-with-everyone moderate
New York Times columnist David Brooks. Krugman compared Congressional Republicans to "Beavis and Butthead," writing:

I'm as cynical as they come. Even so, I’m shocked by the total
intellectual collapse of the Republican Party in the face of this
economic crisis. [...] But it’s getting truly serious when the House minority leader —
essentially, the nation’s second-ranking Republican (after Rush
Limbaugh) — declares that the answer to the economy’s downward spiral
is a spending freeze. That’s not a retrogression to Herbert Hoover; even Hoover knew better than that.

[Republicans] are stuck with the idea that government is always the problem. A
lot of Republicans up in Capitol Hill right now are calling for a
spending freeze in a middle of a recession/depression. That is insane.
But they are thinking the way they thought in 1982, if we can only
think that way again, that is just insane. And there are a lot of
Republicans like David Frum ... who are trying to say Reagan was right
for his era, but it is time to move on. And there are just not a lot of
them on Capitol Hill right now, and I think the party is looking for
that kind of Republican.

It's
appalling on every level. It’s bad economics, depressing demand when
the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment. [...] It’s bad
long-run fiscal policy, shifting attention away from the
essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change
instead. And it's a betrayal of everything Obama’s supporters thought
they were working for.

Will Brooks feel as strongly? His next column is Friday--we'll find out then.

Everyone has someone on their holiday shopping list who’s impossible to buy for. For the second year in a row, we asked Atlantic readers to describe their someone, and brainstormed a few perfect gift ideas for them.